Impact of Offender Sex Across Legal Decision-Making Intercepts in Cases of Domestic Violence: a Meta-Analysis
Domestic violence (DV) – a public health crisis impacting the wellbeing of millions of individuals in the U.S. – is a developed area of research within the social sciences. Thus far, researchers have examined a variety of legal and extralegal factors involved in the sociolegal response to DV, including offender/victim sex. The outcomes of these studies have produced mixed results, and emerging scholarship often emphasizes the complexity involved within legal decision-making, such that extralegal factors impact some, but not all, decision-making points. Given the mixed results of the impact of offender sex in tandem with efforts highlighting the nuance within legal decision-making, the current research explored if and how offender sex is associated with legal decision-making across and within multiple intercepts (i.e., police, prosecutors, and adjudicators) via a systematic review and meta-analyses (k = 34). Meta-analyses revealed that police are no more likely to arrest males or females on average; however, a subgroup analysis of studies controlling for offender weapon use and victim injury demonstrated police are more likely to arrest males than females. On average, police are more likely to dually, rather than singly, arrest females than males. Regarding the second intercept, prosecutors are more likely to pursue cases with male rather than female offenders but no more likely to apply severe charges. Adjudicators are also more likely to convict and incarcerate males than females on average. Importantly, while these meta-analyses generally indicated that males, on average, are treated more punitively in DV cases, virtually all analyses indicated significant heterogeneity in effects, with most highlighting that females may be treated more punitively across comparable studies. We discuss the results in the context of extant literature and study limitations.
domestic violence, intimate partner violence, legal decision-making, meta-analysis, sex/gender
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